The nominees for the 64th Annual Grammy awards took place two days before thanksgiving this year and much to celebrate Cristy Barber is at the center of the Best Reggae Album category. The Grammy nominated producer has been working in the music industry for over 29 years. Her name, ‘Grammy’ and ‘reggae music’ are interlinked both locally and internationally. “It’s a big holiday here tomorrow” she said “And I have family in town and I am settling them in”.
Her real family I presumed, not her music family but I want to talk to her about music. I would later find out that her music family is also her real family.
“Tomorrow is Thanksgiving so I will answer these(questions) Friday”, she forwarded. Barber knows every name and face of note in the reggae music industry. She lives next door to grammy nominated singer Gramps Morgan in Nashville Tennessee, with whom she has worked, along with Buju Banton, Beenie Man, The Marley family, Spragga Benz, Beres Hammond. “You name it I have worked with them” she said in an Onstage interview.
With Supercat as her first client, she has seen the ups and downs of the dancehall/reggae music business first hand from the days of vinyls and cassettes to now when algorithms get to decide the hits.
A day early, on Thanksgiving morning, she sent a message that she is ready to answer questions pertinent to her career and the reggae music industry.
This year the Reggae Grammys are competitive and there was even a tie allegedly, which caused 6 reggae albums to be nominated instead of the usual 5. There has been a-lot of excitement and misinformation since the announcement of the Grammy nominees, especially among the Jamaican acts who are featured guests on other projects. In our mid morning talk, Barber sets the record straight about the Grammy’s new rules and how the reggae category is affected.
JR: How long have you been working close to reggae music and the grammy?
CB: I have been in the music industry since 1992 and i have been working with reggae since 1992 and its almost 30 years. I got involved with the recording academy in the 90s when I became a member. I became a voting member in 2004. So I am almost like a unicorn. Very rarely you have somebody that is a voting member nonstop for almost 20 years if not more than 20 years now. I used to be on the Grammy screening committee. I am a part of a very prestigious committee in Nashville now and I became a grammy nominated producer in 2004 when I produced the album Def Jamaica. When I was appointing to the screening committee around that same time is when I realized that there were issues in our categories and I started a voter awareness campaign..just to try to get people to register to vote, just so that we can have more people and the reggae industry actually voting for the reggae album category.
JR: Who is the best artist you have worked with?
CB: I love all the artists I have worked with. Obviously everybody who knows me knows that when it comes to reggae music my all time favorite is Supercat. That’s the reason why I am in the music industry and the reggae industry. I think besides all the projects I have done i think one of my favorite things and the best artist I have worked with and the thing that I have been incredibly honored to be able to do is work for the Marleys and be the president of Tuff Gong/Ghetto Youths at DefJam Universal for so many years, and be entrusted with working with the family and the catalogue, and everybody knows thats my reggae family right there. Although every artist I work with I love and adore and I still work with them to this day, that is one of my biggest career honors for sure.
JR: Which has been your most memorable year in music?
CB: That would be the year I was nominated for a grammy. I have been obsessed with music since I was three years old and I have been watching the Grammy since I was ten years old. My mother and family can attest to this; I used to unplug the phone so when it would ring I wasn’t be disturbed. I always knew I wanted to be a music producer at ten years old not even knowing what it meant, I just loved that category. I always knew I wanted to work for Columbia records which ended up being the second label I worked for. Because my favorite group when I was a teenager was Wam and George Michael and that’s where he was signed.
So I think being nominated for a Grammy which meant the world to me, that was probably the best and worst day of my life because you hear them announce your name then you hear that you lost. But I couldn’t have lost to anybody better because that was the year that Toots took home his first grammy who was my dear dear friend. So if you have to lose to anybody, lose to the man who came up with the word reggae.
JR: The Grammys announced changes this year but were there any changes to the reggae category?
CB: Technically this year there was a major change but it really wasn’t announced, it kind of was noticed before the first ballot went out. What the academy has done this year is it has limited us voters. We are only allowed to vote in three fields outside of the general field. Which I said to everybody before the nods came out, this was going to be interesting, it’s very hard to make the predictions. You kind of knew but you weren’t really sure because of the issues we’ve had in our category which is people coming over to vote in our category that weren’t really familiar with the big records of that year, they were only familiar with big names.
The name recognition problem we’ve had for many years, we still have but not as bad. I feel like the voter awareness campaign and Grammy advocacy I have been doing has helped us with that a-lot and educating our industry on how this whole thing works. But now that you can only vote in three fields that means people are not gonna come over to reggae unless they really love reggae and that’s really what the academy is trying to do. If you do Jazz music of course you are gonna vote in the Jazz field because that’s what you do…so you have to be very precise on where you are voting. It does limit the visitors coming over to reggae. I think we saw a little bit of that with the nominees that are there.
JR: Should the featured artists on the best albums consider themselves nominated?
CB: No, you are not nominated. In an album category the person who takes home the grammy is the person who is nominated. Which is the artist or the producer who has produced more than half the record. So if you are a featured artist on it you are not a nominated artist, you are on a grammy nominated album. I could say that because I got about 15 different certificates in my office right now from doing work on people’s albums that have either won or Grammy nominated so I am not gonna sit up here and write in my bio “13 time nominated” “5 Time winning”. I am a Grammy nominated producer, you can go on grammy.com search my name and it pops up. That’s the thing that people really get confused with and it kind of annoys me because you are not gonna see Brad Pitt saying academy nominated or award winner unless he was nominated or won and it’s the same thing with the Grammy.
JR: Who do you think will win?
CB: That’s a loaded question, I know who I would love to see win and I know who has the best chances to win but all I can say is i am friends with everybody who has been nominated and I wish them all the luck in the world.
They all do have (the best chances to win). Soja has been nominated before, Sean has been nominated, Etana has been nominated, this is an amazing time for Gramps Morgan, he has been nominated in one with his family, this is him as a solo artist, great achievement for him. An album that he recorded and produced here in Nashville, he actually is my neighbor here. You have Jesse Royal who I am super excited for. I just love to see our young artist get their first nod. It’s a really good set of people nominated. Super excited for Grace(Spice), I’ve known Grace since she started in this industry. I think it’s amazing what Shaggy has done, and came in and saw the potential, hard work and the growth she did on her own…so well deserved.
JR: Do you think taking away the committees hurt or help the Grammys?
CB: Committees will not be taken away, that’s never going to happen, they can change and they can reorganize, and they can be renamed but there has to be some sort of structure in this whole process. If you have the right people appointed to these committees following the rules and guidelines that are set by the recording academy they help tremendously. It’s when people are nominated to these committees that don’t really care, they just love to say they are part of these things and they don’t put forth the time and the effort they need to in order to do the process correctly. It is such an important thing. It’s still and always will be probably the biggest award in music that you can get anywhere in the world.
JR: What other changes would you like to see in the Grammys In the reggae or any other category?
CB: I see room for growth and changes, and things that upset me, and things that I am happy about. I think we need to make sure that we have people in our industry becoming voters. Being able to become voters, keeping their memberships up so that they can continue to vote and having the right people voting in our category that represents what’s actually going on in our industry at the time. To make sure the right nominees and the right albums are winning.
More things are changing than not, and thinking of another category for our genre is probably never going to happen, we are lucky we have the ones that we do because we have very low submission rates right now and we have to protect our category. That’s what’s really important. That’s why and how the Latino community gets behind their music and they actually have their own separate Grammys. You see what the Jamaican community can do on an international platform whether its sports or beauty pageants, fashion designers, culinary.
JR: What are some of the lessons from Nashville’s music scene that Jamaica could apply?
CB: I came to Nashville ten years ago, because I did an album called Reggae’s Gone Country with John Rich from Big & Rich. I gravitated to Nashville because it is just like Jamaica, the music is so similar, they are all songwriting based, they kind of have the same subject matter, and there are studious on every corner. This is called “City Music USA” and every genre is represented here; it is not just a country town.
I think Jamaicans would really love it here. You land at the airport and all of the messages about keeping your luggage safe are done by an actual recording artist and the ads all over the wall are for publishing and record labels. It’s exciting, it’s vibrant, there is music on every corner. It reminds me a lot of Jamaica, that’s why I am so attracted to it. Nashvillians also worship reggae music, they have so much love and respect for it.
JR: DefJam had a lot of success in reggae/dancehall but now they don’t have anyone on their roster, do you think they should look to Jamaica?
CB: DefJam has always kind of had their pinky toe in the reggae pool. I don’t see that changing. The major labels just dip their pinky toe. not since the early 90s when I started has any of these labels really deep dived into the genre. I don’t think Jamaican music needs the major labels. it’s such an influential genre and it’s gonna continue to be.
JR: Who is your favorite reggae artist of all time?
CB: It’s really hard for me to call for a top five reggae and dancehall artist right now. I’d have to really think about that. But my favorite reggae singer of all time is Garnett Silk, absolutely, hands down for ever and ever. But my favorite dancehall artist is Supercat.
I like Maxi Priest, He is an amazing vocalist. Stephen Marley. From the female side I absolutely love Lady Saw. I will always be an ultimate fan of Marion.
JR: Thank you so much, Happy Thanksgiving.
CB: Happy Thanksgiving.
